Stalin's Folly

This article is excerpted from Stalin’s Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War II on the Eastern Front, a new book by Constantine Pleshakov, to be published in May by Houghton Mifflin.

The War Spreads to Russia

Joseph Stalin was an insomniac, often staying up until dawn. But on the evening of June 21, 1941, the absolute ruler of what had once been the czar’s immense realm retired uncharacteristically early.

The preceding day had been stressful. Reports of German plans to attack the Soviet Union had been reaching him all day, from many sources. Only a few days before, he hadn’t believed such reports. He had not doubted that Hitler would one day turn his rapacious leer on the Soviet Union, but in Stalin’s mind that would not happen before the spring of 1942, after Britain was on its knees. The German General

Staff, he believed, would not allow Germany to be bogged down once again, as it had been in 1914, in a two-front war. By then, Stalin’s own plan, which he had kept secret thus far even from the majority of his generals, would be in place. It called for a full-scale attack on the Germans, one that would allow the Soviet Union to acquire even more of Eastern Europe and join it to the Red empire.

Until mid-June, Stalin had felt fairly secure, and if anything had made him uneasy, it was not the German lines rapidly unfurling along the Soviet Union’s western border, but the pestering of his two top military commanders, People’s Commissar of Defense Semyon Timoshenko and the stubborn and outspoken chief of the General Staff, Georgy Zhukov. While the timing of a German attack was settled in Stalin’s mind, the generals were far less sanguine. By his order, they had developed the top-secret plan to launch the Red Army’s offensive down the road, but they also knew that if Germany attacked now, the plan would be irrelevant, and there was no defensive strategy to fall back on, because the dictator deemed such a precaution unnecessary. It was a potentially catastrophic scenario, as the two generals continually reminded him.

Stalin had withheld from them the alarming information he was receiving from his spies in Europe – information that consistently predicted an imminent German attack – but they were receiving sufficiently unnerving reports of their own from the frontier. At least ten German planes were crossing the Soviet border daily, some penetrating 30 miles into Soviet territory. One of the planes had not turned around until it reached Moscow, 650 miles inside the border, where it safely and impudently landed, presumably having reconnoitered the most likely route for the German ground troops from the frontier to the Soviet capital. Timoshenko and Zhukov agreed that intrusions like this unambiguously pointed at Hitler’s intention to strike soon. On June 13, they started pressing Stalin to allow them to put the troops on the western border on high alert. “Let’s talk about this later,” the dictator said, brushing them off.

But in a few days the generals returned, even more determined, and asked for an aggressive regrouping of troops and even a mobilization of reservists.

“Do you understand that this would mean war?” Stalin exploded.

The generals kept silent, and in that meaningful silence Stalin toned down his anger and matter-of-factly asked, “How many divisions do we have in the West?”

“One hundred forty-nine.”

“See, this should be enough. The Germans do not have that many.”

But Zhukov had his answer ready. “According to our intelligence, a German division has fourteen to sixteen thousand men, and ours just eight thousand.”

Stalin became exasperated. “You cannot always trust the intelligence,” he snapped.

Zhukov and Timoshenko didn’t dare to object, but privately they agreed that this remark was preposterous. However, the cruel irony was that Stalin had a point: because they were denied access to most spy cables, the generals did not know that spies had already warned of a German invasion, first as early as July 1940, then in the first weeks of 1941, then again in April. Now, distrustful by nature, the dictator simply dismissed the spies’ warnings as stupidity or, worse, treason.

Throughout the first weeks of June, he had met Zhukov’s and Timoshenko’s pleas with immense irritation and tried to see as little of the generals as possible. However, he had now lost all peace of mind. Spy cables from Bucharest or Helsinki could be ignored, but the concentration of Wehrmacht troops along the border and the presence of Luftwaffe planes in Soviet airspace were hard facts.

Twenty-two months earlier, in August 1939, Stalin had allied himself with Hitler by signing the Soviet-German nonaggression pact. So far the alliance had paid off. Hitler had allowed Stalin to occupy Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the areas of Poland, Romania, and Finland that had been part of the old tsarist empire. Eastern Poland had been particularly useful property to acquire, since it pushed the Soviet border 200 miles west.

But annexing territory and gaining control over it are two different matters. Stalin was well aware that the newly acquired territories swarmed with anti-Soviet elements. His police had been working hard, shooting some suspects and sending others to the gulag, but Stalin knew that those who hadn’t yet been uprooted would gladly cooperate with the Germans, maybe even operate a sabotage ring at the rear of the Red Army.

He himself had created an even more serious problem. With the annexation of eastern Poland, the Soviet Union had dismantled the fortifications along its original border. But now, twenty months later, the new fortification line was nowhere near finished.

One of the things Stalin admired about Hitler was his audacious nature. If Hitler was indeed planning to strike now, he had picked his moment well, attacking when the Soviet Union was extremely vulnerable.

After much hesitation, on the evening of June 21, Stalin called a secret meeting to put the finishing touches on the preemptive strike plan. The revised plan called for launching an attack within a couple of weeks.

At 8 pm, with the conference still in progress, he received an urgent call from Zhukov. A German noncommissioned officer had crossed the border to report to the Soviet command that Germany would strike in the small hours of June 22. If the deserter was right, Stalin had less than eight hours to prepare for the onslaught. But when Timoshenko and Zhukov walked into his office fifty minutes later, they found a leader still reluctant to believe that an attack was imminent.

“Could this be a German provocation rather than a real attack?” Stalin asked yet again.

They demurred. “No, we believe the deserter is telling the truth.”

Stalin could have cursed the wily Hitler for outfoxing him. He could have cursed himself for ignoring the present danger because he was consumed with carrying out his secret plan in the future. In a moment of courageous leadership, real or fueled by bravado, he could have said, “We will resist them to the last man. Do whatever you have to do to repulse any attack.” Instead, locked in the doubt that had prevented him from treating previous reports seriously, he asked, of no one in particular, “What do we do now?”

His question was met with silence – not surprisingly, given the fact that telling Stalin something he did not want to hear often resulted in a one-way ticket to the gulag. However, when Timoshenko judged that enough time had passed, he answered the question bluntly. “We should put the troops at the western border on high alert.”

Stalin then learned that Timoshenko and Zhukov had already prepared a preliminary plan for just such a move. Whether he liked it or not, his generals were preparing for war.

“Then read it!” he said with a snort, referring to the document they held in their unsteady hands.

He did not like the plan. Not at all. He acknowledged that some sort of trouble on the border was possible, but he still could not believe it meant war. Perhaps Hitler was probing to test Soviet readiness for war. Perhaps he intended to stage a skirmish to use as leverage in future diplomatic bargaining. But war? A war on Soviet soil before Britain had fallen? It just didn’t seem possible. His judgment had been right so far, and he would trust it.

The troops’ commanders, he announced, were to be informed that a sudden German attack could occur on June 22 or 23 after an unspecified “provocation.” Therefore, the troops were to move closer to the border and stay on high alert throughout the night. If a German incursion was detected, however, they were “not to yield to any provocation,” in order to prevent “big complications” – in other words, all-out war. In effect, Stalin immobilized his armed forces, since any prompt response to the German attack could be interpreted as falling into Hitler’s trap.

Driving back to the People’s Commissariat of Defense, Zhukov and Timoshenko didn’t exchange a single word, locked in their own thoughts about their predicament. The mighty German war machine was about to attack the Soviet Union, and Stalin had tied their hands.

The two generals chose to spend the night in Timoshenko’s office. No officer of the Commissariat of Defense or General Staff was allowed to leave his desk, whether he was on duty that night or not. But at 11 pm, Stalin headed home, believing that his order had taken care of the situation. Shortly after midnight, it would have reached all military district headquarters, and from there it would go to every unit of the Red Army. Or so he thought. Stalin and his top generals did not know that communications in the west had already been disrupted by German saboteurs, acting on Hitler’s order on the evening of June 21 to launch a full-scale attack against the Soviet Union the following morning.

h   h   h

Almost five hours after Stalin left his office, at
3:45 am, General Vlasik, the head of his personal security, awakened him, telling him an urgent call was waiting. Stalin, it was noted, took three minutes to pick up the receiver.

Zhukov was on the phone. He anxiously reported that German planes were bombing all the major Soviet cities along the western border.

Stalin did not respond. All Zhukov could hear was his breathing.

“Did you understand what I said?”

More silence. Finally Stalin asked, “Where is the people’s commissar of defense?”

“Talking to the Kiev Military District. I am asking for your permission to open fire to respond.”

“Permission not granted,” Stalin said. “This is a German provocation. Do not open fire or the situation will escalate. Come to the Kremlin and summon the Politburo.”

Zhukov could scarcely believe what he was hearing. The Germans were attacking the Soviet Union, yet the leader of the country was claiming that it was a provocation and postponing critical decisions.

When Zhukov and Timoshenko reached the Kremlin at 5:45 am, they found just three others there: the spymaster Lavrenty Beria, the ideological watchdog Lev Mekhlis, and Stalin’s always dutiful deputy, Vyacheslav Molotov. Stalin was pale. He was sitting at the table fingering his pipe. The pipe wasn’t even filled with tobacco.

“Could this be a provocation on the part of the German generals?” he asked.

“The Germans are bombing our cities in Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltics,” Timoshenko responded. “This doesn’t look like a provocation.”

“When German generals need to set up a provocation,” Stalin said, “they will bomb even their own cities... Call the German embassy immediately,” he ordered.

The embassy was ready for the call. The diplomat on duty said that the ambassador, Count von Schulenburg, had an important statement to make to His Excellency, the people’s commissar of foreign affairs, Mr. Molotov.

Shortly after Molotov left to meet with von Schulenburg, Zhukov’s deputy, General Vatutin, sent word that German troops had started crossing the border. The invasion begged for an immediate response, but Stalin still delayed. “Let’s wait for Molotov,” he stubbornly muttered.

In a few minutes Molotov slunk into the room, looking shaken. “The German government has declared war on us,” he said. Taking his seat at the conference table, he failed to mention that when von Schulenburg had made the fateful announcement, he himself had squeaked, “What have we done to deserve this?”

By Stalin’s lights, they had done nothing whatsoever to deserve it. On the contrary, for twenty-two months, since the start of the war in Europe, the Kremlin had been going out of its way to cajole Berlin, as if appeasement had not already been tried at Munich and been shown to be ineffective in satiating Hitler’s appetite. Only a few days earlier Stalin had shipped nine tons of strategic raw materials – copper, nickel, tin, molybdenum, and wolfram – to military plants in Germany. He had personally authorized German officers to investigate Soviet border areas, allegedly to find the graves of German soldiers lost during World War I, ignoring the repeated warnings of Zhukov and Timoshenko that these trips were logistical intelligence-gathering missions.

Now, having heard the declaration of war, Stalin sank lower in his chair. Although he said nothing, no one else stepped in. Nobody in the room seemed to know what to do next.